Private money, public goods – are farmers in control?
© GNP Private finance has been touted for decades as a way of bringing new money into agriculture while helping businesses secure more resilient supply chains and meet environmental commitments.
Now, it is becoming a more important part of the government’s vision for farm support.
The 25-year Farming Roadmap, published by Defra in June, envisages a greater role for private funding as Environmental Land Management (ELM) evolves beyond 2030, with taxpayer cash increasingly focused where markets cannot deliver.
See also: Farming Roadmap ‘overtaken by events’, leaders warn
Defra’s roadmap says public funding will increasingly focus on outcomes that markets alone do not reward, while its wider strategy is intended to create the conditions for environmental markets to grow.
Landscape Enterprise Networks (LENs) offers one of the clearest examples of what that future might look like.
The project brings together businesses and other organisations with shared interests in a landscape, including Nestlé, Purina, Diageo and PepsiCo, to fund farmers to deliver environmental outcomes.
Its 2025 impact report paints an impressive picture – more than 430 farms covering 229,000ha engaged, £5.4m paid to farmers during the year and £25m since 2021, with around 70p in every £1 invested going directly to farmers.
But the experiences of two long-standing east of England participants, who asked not to be named because they remain involved in LENs, expose some of the tensions that may arise as private finance assumes a greater role.
Both stress that LENs have brought valuable money into their businesses and want the model to succeed.
But they also question whether farmers have sufficient certainty – and sufficient power – within it.
The £160/ha question
One arable farmer, who joined LENs in 2022, initially secured funding for measures including reduced cultivations and fertiliser use.
He later progressed to LENs’ “Resilience Pathway”, designed to recognise farms that have adopted a suite of regenerative practices.
At “Leading” level, the arable farmer said the proposition was a payment of £160/ha across his wheat area.
But for the 2025 harvest, successful applicants were told this funding would cover two years’ crops, rather than one. His conclusion was simple: “That’s actually £80/ha.”
LENs says the payment was temporarily split because many returning farms already had contracts covering the same period, creating a risk of double funding, and the full £160/ha annual rate has now been restored.
This year, however, while two small contract farms were offered funding, the arable farmer says his own farm – with around 150ha of wheat – received nothing. He is awaiting an explanation and accepts this could be an error.
Other participants have received offers capped at £15,000 – effectively paying £160/ha on around 93ha – despite farms still having to meet and evidence the relevant requirements across the whole farm.
LENs says this cap prevents funding becoming concentrated among a relatively small number of larger farms and allows more farmers to access a finite pot.
Stacking and risk
Stacking funding has been raised as another issue, with both farmers saying LENs rules prevent them seeking private funding elsewhere across unfunded productive land.
“We’re unable to make up the shortfall by going into another scheme with anybody else because, contractually, they say the MRV [monitoring, reporting and verification] is over the whole farm,” says the arable farmer.
LENs confirms whole-farm MRV is required and that funding cannot generally be stacked with another private scheme on the same productive land, because the same environmental outcomes could be funded or claimed twice. It acknowledges this “creates a constraint for farmers”.
For the arable farmer, the problem is particularly acute because he has already changed his farming system to meet the pathway criteria.
“They’re leaving me with all the risk and none of the reward,” he says.
Contract concerns
The second farmer, who has been involved since the east of England pilot, shares concerns about the £15,000 cap and whole-farm data requirements.
But his concerns go beyond payment levels to how the relationship between farmer and funder is governed.
He says he has been responsible for signing a master agreement to which other farmers then accede, but believes farmers have had insufficient involvement in developing its terms.
“A lot of the wording was challenging towards farmers. It wasn’t protecting the farmer particularly well,” he says.
He claims concerns were raised about contractual wording, but by that stage, changing it risked delaying or jeopardising funding for participating farms.
LENs says draft contracts are shared with farmers for review and concerns can be raised, but standard terms are “not generally negotiated farm by farm” because they must work consistently across the multi-party programme.
For the pilot farmer, the inability to influence contractual terms reflects a wider concern about how much power farmers have in a model that claims to be built around collaboration.
Asked whether he felt like a partner, his answer was unequivocal: “No.”
“I don’t think they understand because they don’t take the time to understand exactly where we’re actually at in UK farming,” he adds.
LENs says farmers can share views through regional managers, trade meetings, discussion groups and farm visits, but it also acknowledges that as the initiative grows, farmer representation needs to become “more formal, visible and consistent.”
New Farmer Forums and an Adviser Forum are due to launch later this financial year.
Budget limits
The pilot farmer also believes expanding LENs risks spreading available funding too thinly.
“If you don’t have enough money in the pot or you’re not doing the job correctly, you’re not going to get the right outcomes,” he says.
According to LENs, its aim is both to recognise farmers already meeting higher standards and support a wider shift in farming practice.
Longer term, it says limited funding will need to move from “frontrunners” towards helping subsequent cohorts change practices.
LENs stresses it sees private funding as complementary to, rather than a replacement for, public agricultural support.
It also accepts private finance “cannot necessarily provide certainty in the same way as public funding”, but argues pooling multiple funders reduces reliance on individual businesses.
Some farms have received LENs funding for six years, it says, while 10-year agreements are in place with others.
TFA boss warns of uncertain promise of private finance
Tenant Farmers Association chief executive George Dunn believes the farmers’ experiences expose a wider problem in expecting private finance to support more environmental delivery.
“That money might be available today because it’s the thing the board rooms think they need to be doing on environmental schemes, but next year it could be modern slavery and the year after refugees. It’s certainly not guaranteed funding,” he says.
He is particularly wary of attractive initial payments without durable relationships with farmers.
“People can be love-bombed by upfront cash for doing stuff.
“But if there’s no meaningful engagement going forward and no ability to flex that or to look at what happens if things go wrong, that seems to be an inappropriate way to try and deliver some of this stuff,” he says.
Where private markets cannot provide a reliable return for environmental public goods, he argues government must remain responsible.
Dan Sokell and supply chain perspectives
Dan Sokell, who previously created and ran LENs East of England and is now developing the Better Grains initiative, a model designed to channel supply chain funding to farmers through a premium for sustainably produced grain, also believes private money has an important role.
But the difficulty, he says, is getting money efficiently from corporate budgets to farmers at a level which incentivises change and compensates them for taking the risk.
And businesses will not necessarily pay for every environmental outcome.
During his time with LENs, Mr Sokell says businesses could see commercial value in outcomes such as soil health and water quality, while flood mitigation attracted interest principally from the public sector.
There also remains a fundamental question over who ultimately carries the cost.
“Certainly when you get to retail, there doesn’t appear to be an interest in increasing prices,” he says.
“There’s a view that it should just be done, and that really means farmers taking all the risks.”
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